Seeing with the Mind

  What does it really mean, to see with the mind? I was reflecting on this idea after Fashi's retreat in the past 3 days. I think about it from the perspective of Gestalt: what I see already contains a structure which is not in any external phenomena. When I see a cat, I am not just seeing a four legged creature with feline features. I am also seeing my previous experiences of other cats, my interaction with them and my habitual responses to them. All of this happens so quickly that in a sense, I am unaware that it was created by all these previous causes and conditions. It is as though the cat comes to me in a pre-packaged form, with all the emotions I would expect in my response to a cat.
     If I really stop to reflect, there is always a kind of nuanced background in every experience. I might think that something is terrible or good, but both responses are the result of very complicated processing. I am often inadvertently bringing my previous thoughts into the present situation without realizing that it is coming from the past thoughts stored in mind. Fashi had mentioned during the retreat that whenever a person sees another person, that seeing contains all the previous karma the two have had with each other. I interact with the previous experience, not with the person in front of me. So in that moment, there are things I can do and choices I can make. I can either go back to the same habit of seeing, or I can simply generate new thoughts or conditions. I am never bound to the past thought. Fashi also used the example of language to demonstrate this idea. When I put together the sentence, "Hello, I am Keith", I am connecting the "Hello" with "I" and so on, without realizing that "Hello" has already passed. I connect the things together to make a single sentence, but I never realize that this 'sense' I am making is not coming from the sentence itself but from my habit of joining the words together to generate meaning. Not only this, but I also take this "I am Keith" (a name, a label) to be the true being that is aware, rather than seeing it only as a word. It seems that we are making these kinds of assumptions all the time, never quite realizing that they are 'so' because we make them so.
     Another example might be the word 'queer'. At one time, "queer" was used in a way to isolate homosexuality. Nowadays, the word is used in a much more positive way to challenge dominant social norms. Is the word good or bad? The meaning of the word is always changing based on the contexts that people individually and collectively create around it. If I see it in this way, there is nothing that can be 'said' about anything that is ever absolute, because words are only creations of the mind. Just as we create a context and meaning around one word, so we can also create multiple and very different meanings around the same word or sound. Another example: even though the word 'grass' tends to evoke something that grows on the ground and is green, it can also refer to 'grass jelly' or 'lemon grass', all of which don't refer to this image in the mind of what I think grass 'means'.
     So what can one do with this? I think that in order not to be entangled in the mind's creations, it's important to use meditative methods to anchor the mind, and simply not to get lost in connecting things together to make meanings. There needs to be a space of awareness that is not stuck to meanings, in order to realize that meanings are creations of mind. The second is to get into the habit of looking for what is aware, rather than being attached to objects of awareness or taking them to be the self.